FW: Speed comp. TNG & 2.2.alpha (fwd)

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Peter Samuelson wrote:

> [Andrew Bartlett]
> > RedHat has this 'feature' whereby all users are automatically made
> > members of a private group - eg I (abartlet) have a primary group of
> > 'abartlet', of which nobody else is a member.

> Yes, useful feature; Debian does this by default as well.

> However, I believe at the moment it is incompatible with Samba
> including Samba-TNG.  In the NT world, users and groups (and aliases)
> all share the same namespace, so you can't have name collisions.  Samba
> does not yet deal with this situation gracefully -- although the issue
> has come up before (usual suggestion: groups that collide with users
> can be mangled with a fixed prefix or suffix that is assumed not to
> occur in usernames).

Just a thought (one with no experimental backing), but would it be possible by
default to find namespace collisions (resolve the rid to a gid, getgrgid(gid),
get the name, getpwnam(group_name), tag as a collision) and mangle them by
appending a non-printable character to the group name returned?  If we append
a character that can't be displayed, but which would be /preserved/ by NT, we
can effectively display both the user and the group with that name in all of
the relevant lists without worrying about complex mangling maps.  The only
limitation would be if you ever needed to type out the group name -- is this
an issue that comes up?  I've typed in usernames, but in my experience group
names have only ever come up in contexts where I have a listbox available to
me.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer